Talk:French Revolution and David/@comment-24416604-20140211171042/@comment-24445489-20140211194033
Jamie, great response. I see what you mean about Burke's take on the rights of man inside society. While I agree that he seems to have said some really harsh things about man's inability to judge himself fairly (which, you're right, would take away his self-determinance), I think that Burke, like many of the philosphers we've read so far in class, contradicts himself just a little bit. So while we and other critics can read him in a way that would make him seem like a hater of man's singular power in politics, I also think he expresses a couple ideas that are more pro-man's-rights, which would make us like Burke as a philosopher just a little bit more. First, while Burke seems to think that while some of society’s demand for man’s “pretended” rights are extreme and ill-formed (like that society was formed for man’s advantage and so man deserves all the advantages that society has to offer (p217)), he doesn’t seem to scorn man’s ideas for rights in general, as much as you seem to feel that he does. In fact, he says at the bottom of 217, “far from I from denying in theory; full as far is my heart from withholding in practice (if I were of power to give or to withhold) the real rights of men. In denying their false claims of right, I do not mean to injure those which are real, and are such as their pretended rights would totally destroy.” Much of what man demands as their own rights, Burke says is perfectly fine and attainable—it’s only that these pretended rights seem to muddy the waters of “man’s rights” in general, and so he seeks to separate the two. My interpretation of Burke’s “''real'' rights” are very similar to what you described above—but as far as the “pretended” rights, I disagree a little. I think that Burke intends that the only actual “pretended” right of man, or in other words the only right that man demands for himself that was is not naturally guaranteed to man, is that the government should offer every man every opportunity that it can to ensure his happiness and success. This is the “man deserves all the advantages that society has to offer” idea that I discussed a couple paragraphs up. Everything else that Burke denies to man, in my own interpretation of his writing, is the fault of the construction of civil society. This, I think, gets back at the heart of the original discussion question—Burke gets the “pretended” rights out of the way at the beginning of the passage, so that he can spend the rest of it dividing the real rights of man and the “rights of man” that exist within French Society. On page 219, Burke says that “Society requires not only that the passions of the individual be subjected, but that even in the mass and body as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power out of themselves.” If I’m not mistaken, this is part of what you interpreted as the “real” rights of man according to Burke—that man only dreams that he should have the power to decide things for himself and to pursue his own happiness in the face of a government that wouldn’t ever let him rule his own life. But what I see here is Burke’s depiction of society, not man: Society as one big entity, as one big construction that exists outside of the natural individual, oppresses man and takes away his self-determinance. But that’s the right of man in French society—the natural rights of man, I think, are everything else that man demands as a natural right, so long as he’s not a big enough idiot to think he as an individual deserves every single good opportunity/advantage (like the keys to the largest mansion, or a world-class education) that the French Government could possibly give him. I think most of what you read as Burke denying man was, in my own interpretation, society denying man. I think that’s his whole point in the first place.